The purpose of this article is to discuss the opportunities and challenges of using students' personal narratives of the past as a vehicle and catalyst for learning history. The point of departure is a research project entitled "My Historical Backpack," conducted at Örebro University in Sweden since the fall of 2016. The project is a…

This volume is based on an ERASMUS+ project that ran from 2017 to 2020. It aimed at empowering both prospective teachers and teacher educators to actively become agents of their own continuing professional development. It further intended to cooperatively establish a culture of self-reflection, as well as an intercultural network of professionals…

Denmark and Sweden have witnessed a historically significant amplification of parental influence in compulsory schools during the past two decades. The emphasis on parental involvement in these two countries reflects international trends of neoliberal governing of educational processes. We know very little about the interplay between beginning…

A core element of the proPIC project is the development and implementation of the so-called study weeks: a five day face-to-face stay abroad at one of the partner institutions in which all the participating students took part. In this chapter, the authors present and discuss the results and impact of these events which took place twice during the…

Students who aim to become physics teachers for secondary education partake in physics courses together with other physics students. The aim of this study is to understand what is valued, taken for granted, and possibly reproduced in physics teaching given for future secondary school physics teachers. This study is based on observations in…

A key goal of global education in language teaching is to "have students 'think globally and act locally'"(Cates, 2013, p. 278) -- an idea in line with the concept of glocality. Virtual exchange -- i.e. connecting learners with different lingua-cultural backgrounds over extended periods of time via digital communication technologies (The…

The aim of the present study was to use the narratives of beginning teachers to investigate the emotionally challenging situations they face, with a focus on how their perspectives and definitions of such situations guided their actions and made coping possible. A short term longitudinal qualitative interview study was adopted. Twenty participants…

In this article, we discuss the views of 117 special education student teachers related to their oncoming profession in the framework of ecological theory. Together, 68 students from Sweden (26 special teachers and 41 SENCo students) and 49 from Finland responded to a questionnaire. We compared the respondents' thoughts about their future work…

Long before Namibia's independence in 1990, Sweden initiated a policy dialogue with Namibia's future political leadership. This article reviews the impact of an educational reform in Namibia in the early 1990s called the Integrated Teacher Training Programme (ITTP), which was an outcome of collaboration between the South West African People's…

This article reports on the working conditions within Swedish ICT-supported distance-based teacher education. Data collected from teacher trainees are analyzed and discussed in relation to Swedish governmental policies concerning teacher education and distance education and theories emphasizing the importance of social aspects of education. The…